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Low Murder Rate Brings New York Back to ’63

It was a year of trauma for the nation, and of foreboding for New York City. In 1963, the year that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, New Yorkers were feeling strains in the urban fabric: Affluent families fled to the suburbs, job losses mounted among old-line manufacturers, and 548 people were killed.

As 2007 draws to a close, it seems very likely that there will be fewer than 500 killings in the city (as of Sunday evening, there had been 492) for the first time since reliable records started being kept.

That was 1963.

The body count that year reflected the beginnings of what was to be an alarming rise in the city’s murder rate through 1990. In that year, the city’s worst, there were 2,245 homicides and New York City was known as the murder capital of the nation.

In 1963, “the seeds of decay were clearly in the air,” said Jim Curran, a professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who spent the year as a rookie in the New York Police Department and still recalls people crying on the street when Kennedy was killed. “People became less concerned about the rules, maybe even including the one that says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

Most current residents of the city, which had a median age of 34 in the 2000 census, were not even born. The drug wars had yet to begin, and the mob wars had yet to end. Many of the killings were committed with knives.

Although the available crime data makes complete comparisons between 1963 and 2007 difficult, one other shift is abundantly clear. Manhattan, which had far more killings, 237, than any other borough in 1963, has shed that unwanted distinction. This year, Brooklyn, the most populous borough, has been the deadliest, with just over 200. Manhattan has had fewer than 70.

Photo

In what became known as the career girl killings, 21-year-old Janice Wylie, left, and 23-year-old Emily Hoffert were stabbed to death on Aug. 28, 1963, in their Upper East Side apartment.Credit
Associated Press

Thomas A. Reppetto, a law enforcement historian and former president of the Citizens Crime Commission, a group that monitors police policies in New York, attributed the change in Manhattan’s position to more than a decade of rigorous enforcement by the police and prosecutors, and to demographic changes that have brought fresh investment and stability to some neighborhoods.

This year, fewer than 100 victims were strangers to their assailants, a low number that belies the image of people being killed in New York during random attacks or robberies. In that respect, Mr. Reppetto said, the profile of murders in the city is closer to what it was in 1963 than to the turbulent 1980s and early 1990s, when murders were more often carried out over drug deals and between strangers.

Professor Curran said the availability of guns, including semiautomatic weapons, had vastly changed the criminal environment over four decades. Mr. Reppetto, who has written extensively on organized crime, said Mafia families were near the height of their power in the city in 1963, and were tied to some of the murders that year.

A review of crime accounts from 1963 shows a variety of methods, motives and weaponry. A Queens shipping clerk was charged with killing his boss with a hammer. A Brooklyn artist who told an intruder in his home, “Before you take my money you can shoot me,” was dispatched with a sawed-off shotgun.

Another victim was Joseph Mendola, 19, a clerk at a Waldbaum’s supermarket in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. When the robber entered the store and ordered the workers to line up against a wall, the police said, Mr. Mendola asked which one. If it was intended as a joke, the robber was not amused: He killed Mr. Mendola with his shotgun.

Many of the homicides in 1963 were committed with knives, and without evidence that guns were present. But guns were used in several killings that the police linked that year to an underworld war between the Gallo and Profaci families of Brooklyn. On Aug. 9, two members of the rival gangs were shot in their cars in separate incidents, after five others had been killed in the previous two months.

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George Whitmore Jr., left, was initially charged in the killings, but in 1965, Richard Robles confessed to committing them.Credit
Associated Press

To be sure, 2007 has not been without its brutal, seemingly senseless, killings. An assistant has been charged with killing her boss, Linda Stein, a wealthy real estate broker, after an argument inside Ms. Stein’s Fifth Avenue penthouse. And a Queens orthodontist, Daniel Malakov, was gunned down as his estranged wife and young daughter looked on. A relative of Mr. Malakov’s wife has been charged.

But none of this year’s killings caused the kind of widespread horror and fear spread by two slayings on the Upper East Side on Aug. 28, 1963.

Janice Wylie, 21, an aspiring actress who worked at Newsweek, and Emily Hoffert, 23, who was about to begin work as an elementary school teacher on Long Island, were found bound and stabbed to death in a ransacked, $250 a month, five-room apartment they shared at 57 East 88th Street.

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Weeks passed, then months, without an arrest in what became known as the “career girl killings.” The next year, a 19-year-old man, George Whitmore Jr., was arrested and charged, and could have faced the death penalty. But he was eventually cleared by witness accounts that he had been in Wildwood, N.J., watching Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on television on the day of the crime.

In 1965, Richard Robles, 20, a parolee with a long criminal record, was arrested, and eventually confessed to the murders. The case helped lead to the abolition of the death penalty in New York. (A 1995 state law reinstated it, but a court later found the law unconstitutional.)

Another homicide victim in 1963 was Jules Bulgach, 71, a fruit and vegetable seller and one of the last of the city’s horse-and-wagon peddlers. When he refused to turn over $172 to two robbers who approached his wagon in Harlem, one of them stabbed him in the side.

“I am hurt,” Mr. Bulgach whispered as he curled up against a building stoop, where he was approached by two officers and the pastor of a nearby Catholic church. “I’m Jewish,” Mr. Bulgach was reported to have told the pastor, who replied, “I’ll pray for you anyway.” Mr. Bulgach died a few minutes later.

Jack Styczynski contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Low-Water Mark for 2007 Murder Rate Takes the City Back to 1963. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe